Machine Translation.(Questionnaire 2 and questionnaire 3)

There are other research topics apart from Speaker Recognition and Computational Semantics. One that I think is really interesting is Machine Translation. This term has its origin in the 17th century when René Descartes (French philosopher, mathematician…) proposed a universal language. He wanted that the same ideas in different languages had the same symbol.

In these times, Machine Translation or MT is a field of computational linguistics that investigate how to translate text or speech from one natural language to another using computer software. It has to be said that the invention is extremely useful in areas where formal language is used such as legal or administrative documents. Nevertheless, when it is a colloquial or familiar text, the machine normally makes lots of mistakes because it translates the text word by word. We can see an example in the following picture.

Many computer scientists, linguists… have tried to improve this machine with more or less success. We could mention Hans Uszkoreit who I have talked about in a previous article. He worked in a machine translation project while he was staying at Austin. Moreover, there have being carried out several projects all over the world. For example, one in the National Centre for Language Technology in Ireland or the Norwegian-English Machine Translation in Norway.

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